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How Y Combinator’s founder-matching service helped medical records AI startup Hona land $3M | TechCrunch

May 3, 2024 8:35 PM0


Y Combinator is renowned in Silicon Valley for a lot of reasons, but there’s one service that has quietly become one of its most powerful: an online founder-matching tool.

“I think this is the most valuable digital product that YC has built (i.e. more valuable than Bookface, etc,). It’s astonishing how many founders I meet who met each other on the YC co-founder matching platform,” tweeted seed investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi. (Bookface refers to YC’s famed online collection of how-to startup advice for its program participants.) 

Recent Y Combinator grad Hona is an example, although its founders’ meet-cute story is a bit more exciting than just using that tool.

Hona is a GenAI medical records startup. It integrates into multiple electronic records systems and then summarizes a patient’s medical records, helping doctors prep for the patient’s visit. 

It was initially founded by two friends who have known each other since middle school, Danielle Yoesep and Adam Steinle. They reconnected after graduating college and respective early careers in tech and biotech. Steinle had been a biomedical engineer, Goldman banker, and big tech product manager at Facebook. Yoesep was a scientist for a biotech startup that had just been acquired. They were hanging out with their high school friends while home for Thanksgiving, chatting about wanting to do a startup when the idea for Hona arose. While neither of them were doctors themselves, both had family members who were doctors or in healthcare and they soon settled on an idea: AI to assist doctors with patient data summaries.

They knew they needed an AI specialist co-founder, so signed up on the Y Combinator Co‑Founder Matching Platform. They found one in Shuying Zhang, who also knew she wanted to do a startup, something in healthcare and AI, and had signed up on the service. Zhang’s background combined biomedical engineering and software development, most recently working on AI at Google, and she was at Amazon prior to that.

What came next was a process that sounds a bit like Tinder for co-founders. 

Yoesep and Steinle swiped through profiles in the matching tool as did Zhang. Each of them held several meet-and-greets with potential co-founders. When Zhang met with Yoesep and Steinle, they instantly clicked so well, that the long-time friends offered Zhang a full one-third share of the company.

“We literally met each other and like three weeks later, we’re jobless, trying to build this,” Steinle told TechCrunch.

Having met on Y Combinator, with their backgrounds in tech, they were exactly the type of startup sure to be accepted into the competitive program. They immediately applied to YC for the Summer 2023 batch.

And they were promptly rejected.

So they got to work on their own, building a prototype, showing it to their network of doctors, earning solid reviews, and raising a small seed round. 

About four months later, they applied to YC again for the winter 2024 batch, and were accepted. One of the reasons they got in the second time, Yoesep recalled, was that they never changed directions, or never pivoted, to use the hackneyed Silicon Valley term. Another reason was “because of our dynamic during our interview, showing that we had grown close and enjoyed working together,” she said.

Things started cooking for them after that. Medical doctors at Duke and Harvard agreed to test the product and write a white paper, due to publish later this month. Some angels who were known in the tech and biotech worlds invested. And by the time Hona graduated from YC and did its famed Demo Day, it had already raised a $3 million seed round from General Catalyst (which is pursuing healthtech so seriously it bought a hospital system), Samsung, Rebel Fund (founded by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan) and 1984 Ventures.

Hona still has a tough road ahead. AI for medical transcription is an increasingly crowded field. Big cloud providers like Google and Amazon are offering such tools and dozens of startups are tackling it, too. 

But Steinle says that Hona will compete because it’s “super customizable” to search through medical records for the specific data a particular doctor needs prior to seeing a patient. A cardiologist would get a different summary than a nephrologist. For instance, the upcoming white paper is on kidney stone referrals, so “so we’re pulling stuff like how many millimeters was the stone on the right here?” Steinle describes.

As for Zhang, her advice for others who dream of doing a startup, and are considering using YC’s matching tool, is to “just go out and try,” she says. “Once you start working with people, you will quickly have a good sense whether you get along. You will know right away.”




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Canoo reveals it paid for CEO's jet, AT&T leaks records and X announces NSFW plans | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 10:49 PM0


Heya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the noteworthy happenings in tech over the past several days (and change).

Famed startup accelerator Y Combinator had its Demo Days, and the venture desk took it all in with an appropriately skeptical eye. You can read their day one and day two coverage, along with an AI roundup from yours truly and analysis pieces from the rest of the dogged edit team.

But the world didn’t stop turning for YC. Also this week, Microsoft and Quantinuum, a quantum computing startup, made a scientific breakthrough — or so they claim. The companies say that they were able to run thousands of experiments on a quantum computer without a single error, a feat that’s long eluded the industry.

Elsewhere, Apple could be getting into home robots. Reportedly, the company — fresh off its decision to cancel its long-in-the-works autonomous EV — has put Apple Home and AI execs on some form of robotics project for households, although many of the details have yet to be finalized.

Lots else happened. We recap it all in this edition of WiR — but first, a reminder to sign up to receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.

News

Canoo paid for its CEO’s jet: Kirsten reports that EV startup Canoo paid the rent for the CEO’s private jet — $1.7 million— in 2023. That’s double the amount of revenue the company generated that year.

AT&T leak: Phone giant AT&T has reset millions of account passcodes after a huge cache of data containing customer records was dumped online earlier this month, Zack reports.

No ChatGPT account required: OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI, ChatGPT, accessible to everyone — even people who haven’t bothered making an account. But it won’t be quite the same experience. Devin has the story.

Microsoft unbundles: Microsoft has introduced new versions of its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription services that exclude Teams, its business collaboration chat offering, following scrutiny from European Union regulators and complaints from rival Slack.

Funding

Ghost ghosts: Ghost Autonomy, a startup working on autonomous driving software for automaker partners, has shut down after raising nearly $220 million.

Analysis

Alphabet and HubSpot: Reuters reported on Thursday that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is exploring the possibility of buying Boston-based HubSpot, a CRM and marketing automation company with a market cap of over $33 billion. Ron explains why that’d make for strange bedfellows.

Podcasts

This week on Equity, Alex chatted about BlaBlaCar’s new credit facility (and how it managed to land it), and he discusses how PipeDreams could be onto a clever model of startup construction, GoStudent’s rebound and profitability, Hailo’s chip business and the two new brands that GGV calls home as it divvies up its operations on opposite sides of the Pacific.

And over on Found, Nick Green, the co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market, was the featured guest. Thrive is a membership-based online grocery store that focuses on natural and organic food and household products. Green spoke about how Thrive isn’t just focused on offering healthy options, but also wants to ensure that everyone has access to them — including those with SNAP and EBT benefits. 

Bonus round

NSFW on X: The social media company has confirmed that authorized users on the platform can create NSFW communities, ahead of a change that’ll see all NSFW content on X filtered by default.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Metaview's tool records interview notes so that hiring managers don't have to | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 2:42 AM0


Siadhal Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh were working at Uber and Palantir, respectively, when they both came to the realization that hiring — particularly the process of interviewing — was becoming unwieldy for many corporate HR departments.

“It was clear to us that the most important part of the hiring process is the interviews, but also the most opaque and unreliable part,” Magos told TechCrunch. “On top of this, there’s a bunch of toil associated with taking notes and writing up feedback that many interviewers and hiring managers do everything they can to avoid.”

Magos and Tajbakhsh thought that the hiring process was ripe for disruption, but they wanted to avoid abstracting away too much of the human element. So they launched Metaview, an AI-powered note-taking app for recruiters and hiring managers that records, analyzes and summarizes job interviews.

“Metaview is an AI note-taker built specifically for the hiring process,” Magos said. “It helps recruiters and hiring managers focus more on getting to know candidates and less on extracting data from the conversations. As a consequence, recruiters and hiring managers save a ton of time writing up notes and are more present during interviews because they’re not having to multitask.”

Metaview integrates with apps, phone systems, videoconferencing platforms and tools like Calendly and GoodTime to automatically capture the content of interviews. Magos says the platform “accounts for the nuances of recruiting conversations” and “enriches itself with data from other sources,” such as applicant tracking systems, to highlight the most relevant moments.

“Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet all have transcription built in, which is a possible alternative to Metaview,” Magos said. “But the information that Metaview’s AI pulls out from interviews is far more relevant to the recruiting use case than generic alternatives, and we also assist users with the next steps in their recruiting workflows in and around these conversations.”

Image Credits: Metaview

Certainly, there’s plenty wrong with traditional job interviewing, and a note-taking and conversation-analyzing app like Metaview could help, at least in theory. As a piece in Psychology Today notes, the human brain is rife with biases that hinder our judgement and decision making, for example a tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered and to interpret information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs.

The question is, does Metaview work — and, more importantly, work equally well for all users?

Even the best AI-powered speech dictation systems suffer from their own biases. A Stanford study showed that error rates for Black speakers on speech-to-text services from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft are nearly double those for white speakers. Another, more recent study published in the journal Computer Speech and Language found statistically significant differences in the way two leading speech recognition models treated speakers of different genders, ages and accents.

There’s also hallucination to consider. AI makes mistakes summarizing, including in meeting summaries. In a recent story, The Wall Street Journal cited an instance where, for one early adopter using Microsoft’s AI Copilot tool for summarizing meetings, Copilot invented attendees and implied calls were about subjects that were never discussed.

When asked what steps Metaview has taken, if any, to mitigate bias and other algorithmic issues, Magos claimed that Metaview’s training data is diverse enough to yield models that “surpass human performance” on recruitment workflows and perform well on popular benchmarks for bias.

I’m skeptical and a bit wary, too, of Metaview’s approach to how it handles speech data. Magos says that Metaview stores conversation data for two years by default unless users request that the data be deleted. That seems like an exceptionally long time.

But none of this appears to have affected Metaview’s ability to get funding or customers.

Metaview this month raised $7 million from investors including Plural, Coelius Capital and Vertex Ventures, bringing the London-based startup’s total raised to $14 million. Metaview’s client count stands at 500 companies, Magos says, including Brex, Quora, Pleo and Improbable — and it’s grown 2,000% year-over-year.

“The money will be used to grow the product and engineering team primarily, and give more fuel to our sales and marketing efforts,” Magos said. “We will triple the product and engineering team, further fine-tune our conversation synthesis engine so our AI is automatically extracting exactly the right information our customers need and develop systems to proactively detect issues like inconsistencies in the interview process and candidates that appear to be losing interest.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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